Abstract

The paper investigates the prospects of Spohn’s ranking theory with respect to Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction. Based on a novel analysis of the riddle (Freitag [manuscript]), we show it to be an inductive extension of Hansson’s puzzle (Hansson 1992, 1999). As a consequence, a solution needs to take into account the dependence relations between evidential beliefs: “grue” is unprojectible because it depends on evidence whose projection is defeated. It will be suggested that this solution can be implemented into Spohn’s ranking theory, but that ranking theory is unable to provide a proper explanation of the required conditional ranks.